


Found

by DelilahBlueEyes



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 09:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DelilahBlueEyes/pseuds/DelilahBlueEyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rumbelle Secret Santa fic for my lovely onceaholic, who prompted: Cursed Belle finds Mr. Gold by Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Found

Belle is determined. No matter what they take from her, they can’t take that. They tell her she is not a princess, but she is. They tell her that she is home, but she knows it for a lie. Scratchy sheets and chemical smells are not home. Home is warm and dark and dusty and…..

She looks for it when they’ve pushed her pills into her mouth and left her in her chair by the window. She searches through the mist that clouds her mind, always waiting for a gap between the shifting shroud that the medicine puts her in. There is a castle in there, a great fortress that reaches up toward the sky with it’s pointed stone towers. It is tall and dark and familiar. It holds everything she needs, everything she misses. Her memories are trapped inside, beating at the door for release and she needs to free them. If she could remember everything maybe they would let her out. Perhaps she could explain more about her quest, the journey she is meant to complete. If she can just remember what she needs to find, then she could escape the sickly sweet smiles of the nurses whose eyes are dead and have her freedom. She could….. She could find…..

 

Sometimes she thinks she may make it through. When the weather is nice and they allow the patients out into the gated yard for recreation, she sits in the crunchy dead grass and sinks her fingers into the soil and feels so close to piercing the veil with her sword. Because in her mind, she has a sword. In her mind she is dressed in a leather jerkin and ties her hair back and looks fierce and strong. In her mind she chases villains and rides dragons and screams until the big, loud silence that fills her up has to subside. She swings her sword back and forth until her arms actually ache. The warped blade glints and slices the air and she feels her blood leap and thrum in her veins, smiling serenely as a worm wriggles past her fingertips. The nurse calls her name from the deck and she opens her eyes, letting her sword fall to her side. There is a word on the blade, but the nurse calls again before she can try to puzzle it out and she leaves it for the time being. The worm pushes its way to the surface, pink and small, to wave goodbye as she returns to her room.

They tell her she liked to read, put books on the scratchy sofa beside her when it is tv time. She never reads them, worried that if she takes new stories into herself it will push her own further away. She needs to remember. She needs to go….. home….. Warm and dusty and big, but never alone. She battles the fog and she takes her medicines and she sleeps as well as she can on the thin cot she is allowed in her room. They took her pencils and paper, told her it was to keep her from hurting herself. She knew it unnerved them to see her reminders to herself, to remember, to not believe them, to find home. They’d taken those too, and left her with bare stucco walls. She stares at them all the same, concentrating on the uneven surface of her cage bars as the medicine turns sour on her tongue and the mists close tighter against her crooked blade.

The days begin to blend together, each beginning and ending in so much the same way that she wonders if she lives the same day again and again. Bland breakfast, exercise time, paper cup full of colorful pills, change of dove grey leggings and sweater, sitting, standing, staring, breathing, fighting. She isn’t sure when she first knew she is going mad. She simply woke one morning with the knowledge that she is wrong. She is losing ground in her battle, tiring quicker. The castle faded completely from sight once and she ignored the tears on her face to struggle back to it. Home is inside, just inside. She needs to find it. She could leave this cold and sterile place and hide away where they could never find her to trap her again.

She has to escape. The leather jerkin she wore changed while she slept. Now she fights against heavy beaten gold skirts that pull at her legs and catch in the brambles that sprung up around her. The hilt of her dagger tangles in the heavy brocade of the cloak that appeared around her shoulders. Small green thorns prick at her skin but she clenches her fingers tighter and swings on, heedless of the burning droplets of blood that drip down her arm. The way is steep and the air thickens like molasses around her until each movement is like fighting for momentum at the floor of the ocean. But she fights and she clings to her weapon, and she wins an inch at a time in the quiet war she wages with herself. The night that a light flickered on in a tower window above her was the night she knew it was time.

She doesn’t swallow her pills the next morning, tucks them into her cheek and smiles at the orderly that watched her swallow her cup of water. She sits apart from the others during their outdoors time, scanning the walls for any visible way to climb them. She wishes she had her dagger. Sometimes her fingers curl into a fist around empty air and she misses the cool weight of it, misses the sting of the thorns digging into her palms. It disappoints her to wake to unmarred skin, another betrayal of the truths she fights for. She’d scratched herself in the beginning, attempted to claw away the first few layers of skin to reveal the scars that surely lay beneath. After a week sleeping with her wrists locked into padded wrist cuffs, she’d stopped. The psychiatrist with the bright orange hair and the impression of serene music that followed him down the halls, he looks at her kindly, but he pities her. If she’d thought he would believe her, she might have asked for his help. But he believes her to be mad like the rest, knows nothing more of her life than she does. She must get out and find her way home, wherever that may be.

It happens without warning. The sun had finally pierced the cloud cover and filtered to the waterlogged forests around the asylum. Belle sits at a table by a window that overlooks the courtyard and circles the castle, flinging herself randomly at the walls. The mist recedes by the minute now and it makes her slightly frenzied. Something is changing, she can feel it in the stale tv room air. When the smoke comes, she watches it roll through the trees, swallowing the land like a great greedy purple beast. It isn’t until she hears the nurses screaming that she realizes it is real, is outside her head. It slams into the building and curls against the edges of the glass, seeking a way inside. Someone falls across the room, another screams but Belle keeps her eyes on the tendrils prying at the window ledge. Until she realizes that the mists that shroud her castle have disappeared entirely. Her breathing speeds up as she finally, finally approaches the enormous front doors. Her hand stretches out, behind and before her eyes, and touches the handle. Pain explodes behind her eyes as the door opens and a flood of images rush over her. Golden dress, red rose, her father in a golden throne, a different man in the same throne, a spinning wheel, her arms full of a hard leather coat and the soft man within, touching his shoulder, laughing with him, kissing him. A thousand thousand things flash before her, death and grief, love and happiness, but foremost in her mind is the man. Sometimes he glitters, sometimes he doesn’t. Once he is angry, so angry, but always he is careful with her. She loves him. They were together in the castle, the real castle that her mind had clung too in the absence of memory. They are supposed to be together now.

She stands on shaky legs and manages a few steps before she collapses. The memories jostle against each other painfully, trying to find the way they fit together and she lay on the floor with her face in her hands, trembling. She remembers now and she has to find home. She has to find him. He is home. Dusty and warm and perfect. A chipped cup cradled between clawed hands, the feel of silk against her fingertips and lips against her own. She needs to go home… The pain fades to blissful darkness and quiet on the cool tile floor.

She wakes in her cot in her room and tears well in her eyes. Had it all been a dream? Perhaps she truly is mad as the red-haired man thought. But as she shifts around to stand, she sees her chair pulled away from the window to face the bed. The man sits there. He looks different now, no longer glittering and impish. He seems heavier now, weighted down by a life lived hard and lonely. He sits staring down at his hands wrapped around the golden head of a walking stick but looks up when she stirs. His eyes…

“Belle,” he chokes, and tears gather in those eyes that are so familiar but so different to what she knows.

She raises her hand and sees scars criss-crossing her palm, stretches her arm out to reach him, to feel any part of him and know he is real. He comes closer, catches her hand in his and raises it to his cheek and the warmth of him fills her. He is smiling and crying and she thinks she is crying too but she laughs and presses her knuckles against his skin.

“I found you.” She is home.


End file.
